Auto bailout could aid Obama

President Barack Obama and his allies in two big industrial unions appear poised to make the auto bailout — begun under President George W. Bush in 2008 — a central issue of the 2012 campaign.

With General Motors back on its feet — it announced $2 billion in new investments at 18 GM plants Tuesday — and losses from the government’s intervention shaping up to be minimal, Democrats hope to punish Republican presidential candidates for their early opposition. The party is building the groundwork for that argument in the key swing states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania, and using it to target the blue collar voters whose allegiance Obama has struggled to retain.

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The task will not be easy. A growing awareness of the seeming success of the auto bailout did little to keep Democratic candidates from being massacred in the region last November.

Obama has already learned, in other contexts, that the political benefits of a crisis averted may be elusive, and some observers note that communities also lost plants and jobs during the bailout and restructuring process — a dynamic that could mute voters' warm memories of the deal.

“There’s a lot of localized opinion on this — depending on if the plant is growing and or the plant is shut down,” said Scott Paul, executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, pointing to Spring Hill, Tenn. and Pontiac, Mich. as examples of communities that lost either jobs or clout in the restructuring process.

Some Democrats also worry that the public still isn’t well informed on the success of the bailout — Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio said he doesn’t know whether the public is aware of the big turnaround in the industry.

The Obama White House and the president’s reelection campaign are determined to tell this story loudly and proudly, Democrats say, and are focusing tightly on the parts of the industrial Midwest where the effects were the most concrete.

“If General Motors would have liquidated and had to sell off their assets, it would have been a disaster.” said David Green, president of the United Autoworkers Local 1714, Lordstown, Ohio. “Without the loans to the auto industry, we’re not working today.”

Kicking off the effort, an email from Obama’s campaign last week reminded supporters in the region that bailing out their local industry “wasn’t the politically popular thing to do.”

Indeed, a December 2008 CNN/Opinion Research poll showed 61 percent of Americans opposed the initial loans to the auto industry. But even at the depths of the national unpopularity for the bailout in 2009, a Rasmussen survey found the measure had the support of 52 percent of Michigan voters, though its outcome was still quite uncertain.

“The very Republicans that now want to be president lined up against this to make it a political issue instead of a jobs issue,” said United Steelworkers political director Tim Waters, whose union, along with the United Autoworkers Union, depends heavily on the car industry and is concentrated in the industrial Midwest.

“Much to their disappointment now — it proved to be very, very successful. Guys like Mitt Romney, certainly Mitch Daniels, and even (Mike) Huckabee and guys like that — they were actually willing to sit and watch the utter destruction of thousands of communities,” he said.